Bad at video games? Your brain structure may be at fault

Gotta love these studies that take MRI’s of brains of people doing particular tasks. It’s worth noting that similar findings have been found in many other tasks as well. We just have to accept that sometimes people are better at doing that things than others, and it is probably to some degree, innate talent.

This also explains why I never was able to beat Super Mario Brothers. Curse that level 8 stage 2!

Prior cognitive, psychological, and neurological studies have shown that expert video game players are capable of outperforming novices in measures of attention and perception. They also have demonstrated that, when novices train on video games for 20-plus hours, they experienced no measurable increase in cognitive ability. These two pieces of information would seem to point to an innate difference between expert and novices gamers, instead of suggesting that gaming is a skill that can be learned.

New neurological research, published in—and made freely available by—the journal Cerebral Cortex has found a correlation between the size of a trio of structures in the human brain and their owner’s ability to learn and play video games. Animal studies had focused the authors’ attention on three distinct structures deep within the brain: the caudate nucleus and the putamen in the dorsal striatum, and the nucleus accumbens in the ventral striatum. It was known that the striatum was used in habit forming and skill acquisition, so a role in video games skills makes sense.